Reddit has filed a lawsuit against AI startup Anthropic, accusing the company of illegally scraping its content to train the Claude chatbot. The complaint, filed on June 4, 2025, in California Superior Court, claims that Anthropic accessed Reddit’s servers more than 100,000 times since July 2024, despite prior commitments to block its bots.
Reddit Claims Breach of User Agreement
According to the lawsuit, Anthropic violated Reddit’s user agreement by using the platform’s content for commercial purposes without securing a proper license. Reddit emphasized that other major tech firms, including OpenAI and Google, have established licensing deals that allow them to use Reddit data for AI development. These agreements are reportedly worth up to $60 million annually.
Reddit is seeking both monetary damages and a court order to stop Anthropic from utilizing any technology trained on its content. If granted, this could directly impact the capabilities of Claude, Anthropic’s AI model.
Rising Tensions Over AI Data Practices
Anthropic, which is supported by Amazon and Alphabet, has denied the allegations and intends to fight the lawsuit in court. The case adds fuel to the broader debate surrounding how AI companies gather training data and whether content platforms are being fairly compensated.
Reddit’s CEO, Steve Huffman, has been outspoken about unauthorized data scraping. He has criticized multiple AI companies—including Anthropic, Microsoft, and Perplexity—for using Reddit’s data without consent. In response, Reddit has taken several steps to guard its platform, including updating its robots.txt file to block unauthorized bots and enforcing rate limits to curb mass data access.
This legal action underscores the growing friction between content platforms and AI developers over data ownership and access. As generative AI tools increasingly depend on massive datasets, the lawsuit could set a precedent on what’s permissible in terms of data collection and usage, especially when content originates from user-generated platforms.
